Reihan Salam

Reihan Salam is the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute, a research and advocacy organization that advances opportunity, individual liberty, and the rule of law in America and its great cities.

Before joining MI in 2019, Mr. Salam served as the executive editor of National Review. Mr. Salam previously worked for The New York Times Op-Ed page and NBC News. He was a 2010 Bernard L. Schwarz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a 2015 Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago, and in 2017, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader.

Mr. Salam is the author of Melting Pot or Civil War? (Sentinel, 2018), which makes the case for a skills-based immigration policy. In Grand New Party (Doubleday, 2008), co-authored with Ross Douthat, he offered a vision for an ambitious center-right program to address the growing gap between the Republican Party and its working-class voters.

Mr. Salam is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a contributing editor at National Affairs and National Review, and a political commentator for CNN. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Public Scholars Advisory Committee at the Moynihan Center at The City College of New York and the Advisory Council for The Public Interest Fellowship.

“A conservatism that does not speak to the cities,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2019, “is going to be marginalized.” He has called for a new, right-leaning coalition that reflects the values of working- and middle-class America in all its multi-ethnic reality. That coalition is largely urban and rejects the divisive victimhood ideologies favored by elite progressives. Successful politicians, he told The New York Times in a 2022 profile, will need to “viscerally understand the cost of saying no to housing development and to decent blue-collar jobs,” and say yes to “effective policing, increasing the number of high-quality schools, and lowering the barriers to new housing and private-sector growth.”